Not a mortgage.
Stewardship.

The default term. Your Ladder Fee is locked for 48 months at the state median household income at signing. Selection multiplier of 1.00× is the baseline — your profile scores are weighted at face value. Most first-cohort stewards choose 4 years.

Committing 8 years earns a 1.10× boost to your selection score — you rank higher when choosing your dwelling among stewards at the same profile tier. Your fee is still locked at the same base rate as shorter terms. The town rewards stability; you get better placement.

The longest term earns the highest selection priority — 1.25× the baseline score. Sixteen years of locked cost, maximum dwelling choice, and the strongest SWF compounding window. Stewards who select 16 years are making a generational commitment; the town reflects that in every allocation.

If you signed as a 1BR steward and want to upgrade to a 2BR before Key Day, you pay the square footage difference multiplied by $10 — the same per-sqft seed rate as the original deposit. You cannot downgrade; all delta upgrades are recorded on the ledger and reflected in your SWF share immediately.

A steward who needs to exit transfers their PLC to any eligible pledger on the town waitlist. The transfer price is formula-set — not market speculation. The exiting steward's SWF share is portable and follows them out. Every transfer is on immutable ledger. The process takes 90 days from vacancy declaration to handoff.

The Ladder Fee is calculated from state prior-year median household income: (State Median HHI × 5%) ÷ 12 ÷ 900 sqft = $/sqft/month. At $80K HHI that is approximately $0.3500/sqft — $455/month for a 1,300 sqft 2BR. This rate is locked at signing for the full PLC term. At renewal it recalculates from the new state median and locks again. Every dollar flows to the next town's construction escrow — tracked on immutable ledger and auditable by any steward.

URBAL stewards hold PLCs, not deeds — there is no assessed property value to tax. But the deeper point is what gets eliminated: property tax is structurally a slush fund, one municipal pool spent at discretion and accounted for after the fact. URBAL's fee architecture makes that abuse impossible — every category has its own escrow on the immutable ledger, and no human can redirect a dollar. The county is still paid: PILOT (Payment in Lieu of Taxes) activates in Year 8 at the county average property tax divided by 4, locked at raise time on the ledger, never recalculated. For most counties that is $15–$25/month for a 2BR — permanent, automatic, zero administration.

Once your youngest child turns 18 or finishes high school, a 4-year grace period begins. If bedrooms remain unused after the grace period ends, a bi-annual surcharge applies: +15% of your Ladder Fee every 6 months, with no ceiling. The escape valve: list the unused bedroom on the internal marketplace — for waitlisted pledgers, relocating stewards, or other stewards' adult children. While listed, the surcharge pauses. This protects town density without forcing anyone out.

A community whose members feel trapped is not a community — it is a detention facility with good architecture. The exit process is mechanical, not discretionary. The formula price is set before you move in and has not changed. There are no negotiations, no market conditions to navigate, no agent commissions. Your SWF balance is calculated and released within 30 days of vacancy declaration. Renovation reimbursements are calculated automatically from the ledger. The unit returns to the community pool — not to a speculative market — and the next steward on the waitlist takes it at formula price. The process runs the same way for every steward, in every unit, in every town. Every time.

The gap between a steward and a conventional household on identical income and savings discipline over 30 years is approximately $3.8 million. The conventional household pays $479,843 in interest on a median mortgage. The car tax consumes $12,000/year — $1.13M in foregone compounding over 30 years at 7% annual return. Healthcare extraction runs $625/month. Student loan payments run $310/month. Remove each layer and redirect the surplus into the index fund. Thirty years of compounding does the rest. The SWF seed — approximately $7,838 for a 1BR steward on announce day, before move-in — is the first deposit into a position that grows with every month of stewardship.